its gates behind--and to pass through, the
red flag uplifted in the sight of all men, with flaming slums and smoking
wrongs for one's funereal pyre!"

* * * * *

So Nellie thought in her indignation and sorrow, changing the wet cloth
on the baby's head, powerless to help it, uncomforted by creeds that
moulder in the crimson-cushioned pews. She knew that she was unjust,
carried away by her tumultuous emotions, knew also, in her heart, that
there was something more to be desired than mere wild outbreaks of the
despairing. Only she thought, as we all think, in phases, and as she
would certainly have talked had opportunity offered while she was in the
mood, and as she would most undoubtedly have written had she just then
been writing. The more so as there was a wave of indignation and anger
sweeping over Australia, sympathetic with the indignation and anger of
the voteless workers in the Queensland bush. The companions of her
childhood were to be Gatling-gunned because of the squatters, whose
selfish greed and heartless indifference to all others had made them
hateful to this selector's daughter. Because the bushmen would not take
the squatters' wage and yield his liberty as a workman to the squatter's
bidding and agree to this and to that without consultation or discussion,
the scum of southern towns and the sifted blacklegs of southern 'estates'
were to be drafted in hordes to Queensland to break down the unionism
that alone protected the bushman and made him more of a man than he had
been when the squatter could do as he would and did. From the first days
she could remember she had heard how the squatters filched from the
bushmen in their stores and herded the bushmen in vile huts and preferred
every colour to white when there were workers wanted; and how the
magistrates were all squatters or squatters' friends and how Government
was for the squatters and for nobody else on the great Western plains;
and she knew from Ned of the homeless, wandering life the bushmen led and
how new thoughts were stirring among them and rousing them from their
aimless, hopeless living. She knew more, too, knew what the bushman was:
frank as a child, keeping no passing thought unspoken, as tender as a
woman to those he cared for, responsive always to kindly, earnest words,
boiling over with anger one moment and shouting with good humour the
next, open-handed with sovereigns after months and years of lonely
toiling or sharing his last plug